Five use cases for digital twins in manufacturing

The digital twin is one of the fastest growing applications of Industrial IoT technology. It creates a complete digital replica of a physical object and uses the twin as the main point of digital communication. Today, almost a half of organizations using IoT say they already have or are planning to adopt digital twins.

Without going into too much technical detail on digital twins – you can read more about creating a digital twin, the challenges and security considerations here – the advantages of digital representation of a physical object are clear. You can monitor its performance while stress testing it under different circumstances. You can predict where failures might occur while running simulations to see how the product design can be improved. All without the need to disrupt or halt your operations.

Gartner has estimated that the use of digital twins will triple by 2022, so where is the technology best suited in manufacturing?

It seems today that the Digital Twin is becoming about as ubiquitous as IoT devices themselves. Popular use cases for digital twins in manufacturing include:

Quality management Continuous monitoring of product data from IoT devices has clear advantages for quality management over random inspection. The digital twin can monitor and model every part of the production process to identify where quality issues may occur as well as analyze the composition of the product being created to ascertain whether there were better materials and production processes that could be used.

Product re-design Conversions of production to other products or smaller series and runs can be run through first in the digital twin. It allows you to both model how product customization will affect the production process and also change how the process works to accommodate this customization. For example, the digital twin can provide specific product data to the production equipment to allow it to create a different product variant without extensive re-tooling that suspend the line for days or weeks.

System planning/virtual start-up The analysis of historical comparative data from similar systems within your plant makes it possible to predict the performance of a system that has not yet been constructed.